“Sin is ignorance. This is the well-known Socratic definition of sin, which, like everything Socratic, is an opinion always worthy of attention. However, with respect to this Socratic position, as with respect to many other Socratic positions, how many men have felt a need of going further? What an innumerable number have felt the need of going further than the Socratic ignorance -- presumably because they felt that it was impossible for them to stay there; for in every generation how many men are there that are capable, even for only a month, of enduring and existentially expressing ignorance about everything?"
Equating sin with ignorance suggests that the manifestation of sin is credited to privation of astuteness. Socrates’ explanation would be validated using Biblical accounts concerning the part that ignorance facilitated in the commission of the foremost sin. The ignorance makes the committer of the sin unconscious of the sinfulness of his engagements. Sinful nature is integral in human beings considering who uncountable sins have been committed throughout the generations ever since the inaugural sin at the Garden of Eden. The ignorance is tremendously inherent that some sins are committed naturally. Consciousness of indicators of moral and immorality stimuluses one’s likelihood of committing sin.
“The concept of the sickness unto death must be understood, however, in a peculiar sense. Literally it means a sickness the end and outcome of which is death. Thus one speaks of a mortal sickness as synonymous with a sickness unto death. In this sense despair cannot be called the sickness unto death. But in the Christian understanding of it death itself is a transition unto life. In view of this, there is from the Christian standpoint no earthly, bodily sickness unto death. For death is doubtless the last phase of the sickness, but death is not the last thing. If in the strictest sense we are to speak of a sickness unto death, it must be one in which the last thing is death, and death the last thing. And this precisely is despair. Yet in another and still more definite sense despair is the sickness unto death. It is indeed very far from being true that, literally understood, one dies of this sickness, or that this sickness ends with bodily death."
The cause-effect affiliation between sickness and death transpires when illness unswervingly elicits death. Mortality is universal for all human beings, and sickness is what causes the mortality of some beings. Based on Christian teachings, physical death elicits the movement onto another form of life; hence, physical death is not the utter qualification of existence. When there is no overt cause-effect between sickness and death, the indisposed individual agonizes unceasingly. Such an individual who would favor passing rather than anguish, hence, submits to despair. Therefore, despair is does not automatically occasion death, but it exterminates the expectations of survival. Despair is connected to an unceasing agony, which could be likened to an emotional bereavement that is principally internal.
